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This week, a chat with the National Film Board’s Gerry Flahive and Katerina Cizek, producers of the interactive documentary A Short History of the Highrise. At Spirithouse on Adelaide St. W. I sipped a Lillet cocktail — my guests opting for non-alcoholic drinks — while It’s a Wonderful Life played on a nearby television.

The drinks: Lillet, the crisp, orange-hinted French aperitif, is commonly mixed with gin and vodka cocktails like the Corpse Reviver #2 or Vesper. “It’s very light and easy to overpower,” says Spirithouse creative director Dante Concepcion. But it’s all about balance, and on Spirithouse’s new cocktail menu, Lillet meets Canadian whisky in The Pushover: ¾ oz Lillet Blanc, 1 ¾ oz rye, ¼ oz sweet vermouth, ¼ oz Benedictine and two dashes of Angostura bitters. Available year-round at the LCBO, Concepcion remarks Lillet isn’t as popular in Toronto as it in his native San Diego, suggesting the rouge can also be used as a sweet vermouth substitute. “It has a nice depth of flavour,” he adds. Unless you’re sipping Lillet on its own over ice and an orange slice, you won’t be using much of it in a cocktail. Keep it refrigerated after opening.

Gerry: Did you special request It’s a Wonderful Life?

They refused to put The Log Driver’s Waltz on loop.

Gerry: Of course. It’s a Wonderful Life . . . I’ve never seen it from start to finish. It’s one of those movies — I just don’t want to.

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It’s ingrained in us regardless. I could stand up and pantomime the whole thing for you but I’ve never actually seen the whole thing either.

Gerry (In a Jimmy Stewart voice): Well what are ya gonna do?

A Short History of the Highrise opens with archival photos of Central Park in New York City, highrise buildings in the distance. What was the research like?

Katerina: We had this amazing resource at the New York Times, a photo archive of six to eight million photographs. It was affectionally known as the morgue, and most of them undigitized.

Gerry: What Kat really retained was that sense of the photographic object, of something that’s been marked up with pencil. You flip it over and there’s all sorts of handwritten notes — metadata really — you know: “This ran in 1936 in the paper.” The captions are there and we retained all of that realness in the narrative.

In documentaries, images are often cropped to fit aspect ratios and the like. Do you find it hinders the texture of the original document?

Katerina: It can. I wanted to give users a sense of what it was like to go through the photos. I love films made of archival photographs but I’m often left wanting to touch them. How was the original context, how was the shot — that was the impetus of the interactive element.

Gerry: There’s an approach to understanding the highrise — it’s 2500 years old, not 50 years old — it’s also become a device that’s loved and hated, is now used as an object of financial speculation, and an ideological tool — public housing in the U.S., workers housing in the Soviet Union.

Katerina: Further to that visual history, we wanted to look at that representation and what it said about the ideology of the time. That’s what’s so great about the photographs, especially in that postwar period; it’s these aspirational openings of buildings, with Eisenhower there — incredibly staged photographs — that really tell you so much about what people thought the highrise building could do for society and the city. I think that context matters.

Eric Veillette tweets about spirits, cocktails and the city @VeilletteTO

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